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Chapter 7. Settings & Control Panel

Every complex machine has a control panel. There’s the dashboard of a car, the knobs on a stove, the cockpit of an airplane. And then there’s the granddaddy of them all: the Control Panel in Windows.

Actually, in Windows 10, the Control Panel isn’t very important anymore. It’s still there, like an old typewriter you can’t bear to throw away. You can still read about it later in this chapter.

But in Windows 10, Microsoft has extracted a few hundred of the Control Panel’s most useful options and packaged them up into a new app called Settings. It’s far cleaner, simpler, and better organized, and it’s designed to accommodate either a mouse or your finger on a touchscreen.

Only the most obscure settings require a visit to the old Control Panel—and over time, Microsoft says, it will move even more of those into the new Settings app.

For the moment, though, it’s clear that Microsoft hasn’t yet completed its mission to unify the two brains of Windows 8. Windows 10 still includes two different apps to adjust your computer’s settings.

Fortunately, this chapter covers them both.

The Settings App

Most of the time, you’ll customize your system in the new Settings app. Volume, screensaver, WiFi setup, privacy settings, PC accounts, color schemes, and so on—it’s all here, in one place.

And where is “here?” There are plenty of avenues to the new Settings:

From the Start menu. Click, press, or tap ; in the left side of the Start menu, choose Settings.

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